The Story of Stan

Stan Fischler is one of those people whose nickname - The Maven - describes him perfectly: "A trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass timely and relevant knowledge on to others." You may know Stan from "Maven's Memories," a column that appears here, or more likely, from his 40-plus years broadcasting not only Islanders hockey, but Rangers and Devils as well. Or perhaps you've read one of his many hockey books - after all, he's written over 100 of them. Not to mention a handful more about the New York subway system, because you know, 100 books just wasn't enough. Stan's outsized interest in both hockey and subways, and his desire to share what he learned about them, served as the engine for his long and successful career.

Here's how the boy from Brooklyn tells it: "I was seven," Stan said. "1939, and my father had promised to take me to see "Snow White and Seven Dwarves" at the Globe Theatre on Broadway and 47th, Sunday afternoon. I was very keen on it. We got to the subway exit at 50th and 8th and it was a downpour. We didn't have an umbrella, and he said, "We're not gonna see Snow White. I'm gonna take you to a hockey game." (Note the role of the subway here - the entrance to Madison Square Garden was right in front of them, only a half a block from the subway exit.) "I didn't know what the hell hockey was. All I knew is I was pissed off we weren't going to see Snow White. So my father dragged me into the Garden, and the Rangers' farm team, the Rovers, were playing the Washington Eagles. I was so furious with him, I figured the only way to get even was by rooting against his team. My team won, and the next day, I had "Show and Tell" at PS 54 and I did the goalie and I got an A. So I thought this hockey thing wasn't too bad. The following Saturday he took me to see Snow White, and Sunday we went to another hockey game. This time the Rovers were playing Baltimore. I loved the whole ambience of the Garden, and from then on I was hooked."
Stan is 88-years-old and he remembers every detail like it was yesterday, but that's Stan for you. He can tell you the exact turning point of a playoff game he saw 80 years ago. And he's like that with anything that interests him - hockey, the subway, and especially jokes. Stan has the right joke for every situation, and he tells them beautifully. He's like a walking hockey (and subway) encyclopedia - if encyclopedias were also funny.

Back to 1939, and Stan's interest in hockey began picking up steam. Soon, it wasn't enough just to go to a single game. By the time he was 10, Stan had figured out how he could catch three games a day. "On Sundays there was a double header at the Garden - a Met League game at 1:30, and then the Rovers would play at 3:30," he said. Both games were free because his mom did volunteer work at the 79th precinct, and in return, she would often get tickets from the Police Athletic League. "After the Rovers game," he said, "We'd run down the block and grab a plate of spaghetti from Buitoni's for 25 cents, and be back in time to see the Rangers - couldn't miss the warm up - for maybe a buck."
MAVEN'S MEMORIES: STORIES FROM STAN
By now, Stan wasn't just watching hockey. He was also listening to games on his tiny, Philco radio. He remembers listening to Foster Hewitt calling the Maple Leafs play the Red Wings in the Stanley Cup Final in 1942, and falling in love. At first he says, it was the Leafs' nicknames: "They had a Bingo and a Bucko playing defense together (Rudolph "Bingo" Kampman, Wilfred "Bucko" McDonald). There was a Turk and a Sweeney - even some of their real names were fantastic. Lorne Carr and Sylvanus Aps. No one in Brooklyn was named Lorne or Sylvanus." To top it off, the Leafs went down in the series three games to none and came roaring back, winning four straight to take the Stanley Cup. That was the first of three straight Cups for the Leafs, and Stan was locked in as their number one fan - in New York City at least.
Waiting for a friend outside the Garden (Yes, he remembers the time: October of '46; the place: across from the Paramount Theater on Broadway and 43rd; and the name, Howie Sparer), Stan spotted a newsstand selling a paper called The Globe and Mail. More ways to learn about the Leafs? Are you kidding? He was in. "Reading that paper was like my vitamins," he said. "I just devoured it." He got a subscription and began scrapbooking. He would clip and save articles about important games or by his favorite writers. He was using airplane glue to paste his clippings, and in retrospect, he says he can't be sure whether the high he felt while doing this was brought on by the glue, or the activity itself. Given that 80 years later he still has the same enthusiasm for the game, and for good sports writing, it's safe to say the glue had nothing to do with it.

Along with the watching, the listening, and now the reading, Stan added one more element. He began writing notes and stories about the games in his program - or when he ran out of room, on the back of his ticket. "The writing," he said, "was "inspired by my desire to retain in memory what I had just viewed. Also it was motivated by my need to voice my opinion about which ever favorite team of mine was involved." That need he felt so strongly at 10 years old has never left him. In fact in many ways, Stan's professional history can be viewed as one life-long proof of concept for those vision boards that are so popular today - only he didn't stop to draw the board. He skipped straight to doing the job he wanted, even when the job didn't exist.
At Brooklyn College, Stan wrote about sports for the Brooklyn Eagle. But there was no hockey team, so he joined the Rangers' fan club and suggested they start a newsletter. In no time at all, Stan and his buddy (Fred Meier) were writing the Rangers Review - a monthly paper that included an interview with a player. Not only did this labor of love pay off for Stan in terms of getting experience interviewing players and writing about hockey; but as it happened, when Stan graduated college, Herbie Goren, the founder of the Rangers Fan Club as well as the Rangers head of PR, needed an assistant. Guess who got the job? "It was a job made in heaven for me because now I'm getting paid," Stan said, "I'm in the middle of the hockey scene. And I'm dealing with guys I had known and revered on the journalistic beat."
RELATED: A SALUTE TO THE MAVEN
When the season ended, so did the job. But an editor for the Journal American who was familiar with Stan's writing, Max Kase, offered him a job. The Journal had the largest circulation of any evening daily in New York at the time, but Stan was torn. The job wasn't just to write about hockey - WHAT? Luckily Herbie told Stan he should take the job and write about hockey on the side. "It was some of the best advice I ever got," Stan said. He covered the '55 World Series when the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Yankees in seven games. And the rematch in '56, which the Yanks won in seven. He wrote about Frank Torre and his little brother Joe when they were schoolboy baseball stars in Brooklyn. He wrote a skating column and a skiing column. But eventually he branched out, covering politics, entertainment, City Hall, etc. City Hall of course included the Transit Authority, and thereby the subway, which Stan had always loved. Not only did it literally lead him to his first hockey game, it was his passport to Manhattan and all that it offered, even beyond hockey. Covering mass transit allowed Stan to indulge his love of, and fascination with, the subway. And because Stan is Stan, that also meant writing a few books on the subject.

The Journal American merged with two other papers in '66, and Stan struck out on his own. He'd been writing about hockey all along for The Hockey News, Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News, and various other publications. He'd also been writing what he referred to as "hockey tidbits," and sending them to Milt Dunnell, an editor at the Toronto Star - the paper with the largest circulation in Canada. Stan got paid by the Star for his stories if they used them, and sometimes Milt would hire him for larger features on hockey and other aspects of life in New York City. In a year or two, Stan was in charge of the New York Bureau for the Star - and once again covering not only hockey, but as Stan called it, "the whole shebang."
It was during this freelance period that Stan took a small job doing public relations for NYU. The job was insignificant. But meeting Shirley Walton was not.
Stan met Shirley Walton in 1967 while doing a small public relations job for NYU. He invited her on their first date, as only Stan could, in a note asking if she wanted to celebrate "Henrik Vermy" day with him. Who, you ask? But so did she, and thus the date became a reality. They shared hot dogs in Washington Square park. Stan took Shirley on plenty of other dates of course, many of them…to watch hockey! Luckily for both of them, she loved it. After they married in 1968, Shirley began helping Stan by writing profiles of NHL players for a book he was working on, "Hockey Stars of 1970." Soon after that, Shirley was happily sucked into the vortex of Stan's hockey obsession and began writing hockey features of her own for other publications. She co-authored about 20 hockey books with Stan and became a sportswriter in her own right. In fact, she was covering the Rangers - Leafs playoff series in 1971 when security guards physically barred her from entering the press box. Shirley - who had already won a discrimination suit against the Professional Hockey Writers Association - immediately filed a protest with the NYC Human Rights Commission . They supported her and at the next game, Shirley Fischler became the first woman ever to be allowed into the press box in Madison Square Garden for a hockey game. Needless to say, Stan lost a few friends over that, but he was always proud of his pioneering wife.
Stan ran the New York bureau for the Toronto Star, with Shirley's help, until 1977. But in 1973, a year after the WHA was formed, Stan was asked to do color commentary for the Hartford Whalers; and his journalistic repertoire quickly expanded beyond the written word. The Islanders had started playing in '72, and Stan covered them from the start as well - not just for the Star, but for a variety of publications. In the late spring of '75, the Islanders were battling the Atlanta Flames for the last playoff spot when cable TV magnate Charles Dolan put a plan together to broadcast the game. Of course Stan was in the booth doing color in what was the very first Islanders telecast on cable. They made the playoffs, and just like with Toronto when Stan was a boy, the Islanders made a run for it; and Stan fell in love all over again.

First they beat the vaunted Rangers in a best-of-three series when JP Parise scored in overtime at the Garden, shocking the crowd and announcing the Islanders had arrived. Then they lost the first three games of a best-of-seven to the Penguins and came back to win. In the next round, they went down by three against the heavily-favored Flyers and managed to tie the series at three apiece, but lost the seventh game - despite Captain Eddie Westfall's attempt to break the magical spell of Kate Smith by presenting her with a large bouquet of flowers before the game began. Needless to say, long before that series had ended Stan had climbed aboard for the ride, and he was a part of the Islander broadcasts almost every year since then. Stan has reported on the Rangers for various networks and publications since 1956, and he's done the same for the Islanders and Devils since before they were born, you could say. While his philosophy of writing coupled with his emotional nature cause him to root for the team he's covering, and he acknowledges his debt to the Rangers for giving him his first shot, he says his "longest and most fervent connection is with the Islanders."
Stan has won many awards and accolades for his writing and his broadcasting, including seven Emmys for his work as an NHL analyst. He's even won the Lester Patrick Award in honor of his contribution to hockey in the United States, which puts him in the ranks with Islander greats Bill Torrey and Al Arbour, along with legends of the game itself like Howe, Orr, Gretzky, and Lemieux. What separates Stan from the pack is not simply his unique perspective on 50 years of hockey in New York. It's his ability to connect with people, combined with his curiosity. As with the subway, his curiosity extends into all aspects of life and is part of what makes him a great interviewer and natural reporter. And when you start with those two central pillars - curiosity and connection - then add his enthusiasm and love for the game, his knowledge of its history, his insight and his ability to interpret and easily communicate both what he knows and what he sees, Stan is truly The Maven.
Last year Stan officially retired from broadcasting and moved to Israel to be with his son Simon and his three grandchildren. His hockey family at MSG, the NHL, and of course all three New York teams - especially Islander fans - miss him terribly. But Stan knew it was time to be with his grandchildren. He'll still be watching and writing about hockey of course. And not just in the NHL. When being interviewed for this piece, he had just returned from watching all three of his grandkids play hockey in Israel. It wasn't asked, but it wouldn't surprise anyone at all if Stan had scribbled some notes down on the game.